The second text in my ‘queer of color critique’ independent study is Siobhan Somerville’s Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Published in 2000, Queering the Color Line examines a range of late nineteenth and early twentieth century sources in order to argue that American understandings of homosexuality during this time period were inextricably tied to the dominant notion regulating racial difference, the black/white color line. Somerville works across the fields of African American studies and LGBT studies with the intention of exposing the ways in which race and sexuality are “refracted through” each other in literary, scientific, and visual representation. Somerville speculates how a discursive analysis of the historical construction of race and sexuality in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America points to the ways in which these identity categories were not coincidentally invented in the same context, but more significantly reflect how the color line has historically shaped the emergence of sexual identity; in other words, notions of sexuality in the United States emerged through a discourse of racialization rather than against. Race and sexuality in the late-nineteenth American context, then, exist in a mutually constitutive relationship.With a methodology not unlike Ferguson’s queer of color analytical lens, Somerville critically peruses sexology and scientific literature, the early American cinematic production of A Florida Enchantment, Pauline E. Hopkin’s novels Contending Forces and Winona, James Weldon’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, and Jean Toomer’s Cane so as to reveal the ways in which sexuality was conceptualized through a reliance on racial ideologies. While Ferguson’s articulation of queer of color critique advances questions regarding how the intersections of gender, class, and sexuality coalesce with racial and national formations under the current historical context of capitalist production, Somerville’s project looks back to the racially segregated Jim Crow era in order to challenge previous understandings of the development of racial and sexual categories. Queering the Color Line, thus, embarks on a simultaneous historicization and denaturalization of the interconnections between discourses of race and sexuality. Reading Queering the Color Line after Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black brings up important questions on methodology and interdisciplinarity. Both texts insist on an approach that unravels the seemingly disparate constructions of race and sexuality. While each text favors a methodology that examines the ways in which identities are constructed in relation to one another, Queering the Color Line and Aberrations in Black each diverge from one another in crucial ways. Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black opts for an ardent disidentification with sociology while Somerville’s Queering the Color Line is more concerned with the historical construction of identity categories. Both scholars engage in literary analysis but within different historical contexts and with different intentions; where Ferguson aims to reveal the interconnection between minority identity and capital, Somerville establishes the inextricability of race and sexuality. In the Introduction to Queering the Color Line, Somerville acknowledges that one of her project’s limitations is an analysis of race confined to the black/white racial dichotomy. Because the project examines a specific time period in American history, a moment in which dominant discourses of racial segregation employed a black/white bifurcation, Queering the Color Line is unable to capture the entirety of American racial and sexual history during the Jim Crow era; “Significant and urgent questions remain about how those who identified as neither “white” nor “black” were situated in relation to the emergence of a discourse of homo- and heterosexuality”” (13).My own questions on mixed-race embodiment in the neoliberal era can take note of key claims in Somerville’s text. Interestingly, the mixed-race body was considered prominently throughout the text. In her first chapter, “Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body”, Somerville shows how discourses surrounding the hybrid mulatto subject resembled those on sexual inversion and the intersex body. In her reading of Pauline E. Hopkin’s fiction, Somerville’s third chapter looks at how the traditional tragic mulatta figure marshals a female homoeroticism; “Inverting the Tragic Mulatta Tradition” ultimately exposes how interracial homoeroticism was, in fact, more imaginable and favorable than interracial heterosexuality. In the chapter “Double Lives on the Color Line”, Somerville engages in a deep reading of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man with the intention of presenting the intricate way the hybrid subject is both racialized black/white and gendered male/female as well as how the ex-coloured man’s narrative is laced with storylines on passing and marrying white.As I think through the contemporary connection between queerness and multiraciality I’ll do so in a way similar to Somerville, one that regards race and sexuality not in an analogous fashion but in a sense that stresses their inextricability.

I'll be moderating a roundtable discussion titled “Women and Gender Studies in Practice: Past Presents and Speculating Futures”. I look forward to talking with a panel of scholars whose interdisciplinary work bridges the gap between history and contemporary, between theory and praxis, between academic scholarship and community engagement. The intention is to discuss the state of Women and Gender studies as a field through a discussion between scholars – scholars who have spent a lifetime working within and without academia and have recently retired from the University of Maryland’s WMST program, with scholars who are now in the early stages of their careers and have recently joined the WMST department at the University of Maryland.

Check out the GSA's website for the symposium schedule. Registration closes on October 16th. We hope to see you there!

This semester I’ll be working with Alexis Lothian in an independent study on queer of color critique. We’ll be reading queer studies texts that serve as foundations for interrogating social formations through the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class. The texts we’ll be engaging with pay special attention to the ways these intersecting social formations work both with and against nationalist ideals. This directed reading will act as a guide for my general research interest in queer of color critique as well as a space to develop thoughts on the next benchmark in my graduate program, the second-year interdisciplinary paper. At this moment, I see this benchmark as a way to think more thoroughly about the ways in which neoliberal multiculturalism and the state’s interest in diversity affects and employs mixed-race embodiment.

We begin the fall semester with Roderick Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Ferguson embarks on an ambitious interrogation of the intersections between African American criticism, queer theory, Marxist thought, and women of color feminism in order to develop what he terms “queer of color analysis”. Arguing against the idea that race, class, gender and sexuality are separate formations seemingly isolated from one another, queer of color analysis extends the work of women of color feminism by taking seriously the ways in which intersecting racial, gender, and sexual practices collude with the nation-state’s normative and regulating practices. In doing so, queer of color analysis practices a critique of normativity in general and heteronormativity in particular. Ferguson asks how racial, gender, and sexual ideologies have been employed to perpetuate regulating practices of the state, practices such as heterosexual reproduction. In the text, Ferguson employs a staunch disidentification of historical materialism. Displaying the ways this Marxist framework universalizes heteronormativity, Ferguson argues that practices of racialization actually helped solidify the hegemony of heteropatriarchy. Ferguson insists that queer of color analysis must not continue this normalizing tradition and instead must vigorously question the ways that capital produces and disciplines emergent social formations.

At the core of Aberrations in Black is a critique of canonical sociology. Paying particular attention to the foundations of canonical sociology, Ferguson reveals how the academic discipline not only banished the work of African American sociologists, but also significantly situated African Americans outside heteropatriarchal norms. Ferguson examines the Chicago School of Sociology in the 1930s and argues that this foundational school of sociological thought was not simply an intellectual formation, but actually played a significant discursive role in knowledge production, a role that served to extend the power of the state’s normalizing practices. Ferguson makes this argument by juxtaposing sociological texts against African American novels. This juxtaposition between epistemology and aesthetic culture displays the ways in which African American culture serves as a site of nonheteronormative difference and thus as a critique of the state’s normalizing practices and the regulating role canonical sociology plays in advancing normativity.

Published in 2004, Aberrations in Black serves as a foundational text for the now prominent analytical frame of queer of color critique. Throughout the text, Ferguson reiterates the need for a queer of color critique to question how the intersections of gender, class, and sexuality coalesce with racial and national formations under the current historical context of capitalist production.

What I found most pressing in this text was Ferguson’s concluding call for the interdiscipline of American Studies, a call that I believe also speaks to the interdisciplinary field of Women’s Studies. Specifically asking for a “postnationalist” American Studies, Ferguson demands that interdisciplinary academic inquiry must study historical subjects through an analytical lens that neither neglects nor discards racialized and classed features of gender and sexuality. In doing so, a queer of color critique practices an earnest engagement in the intersections of identity and societal relations as well as an ardent disruption of normativity. Both of these critical commitments must be challenged within an examination of nationalism and political economy.

My own thinking has begun to purposefully consider the pivotal role that political economy plays. Now that I am on the other side of my comprehensive exams, I find myself thinking more intently about the functions of capital and nation-states. In one sense, I see my work developing within a line of thought that acknowledges how US citizenship operates as a technology of race in that it regulates and assigns heteronormativity to certain racial groups while also producing discourses that pathologize othered/nonheteronormative racial groups. For my second year paper, I hope to think through the ways the mixed-race body factors into the state’s interest in a diverse and thus progressive society. What does diverse and progressive mean in this context? How might images of mixed-race American citizens promote notions of post-racism in particular and post-raciality in general? How might these same images perpetuate notions of heteronormativity? In another sense, I recognize that my intellectual growth may need to engage in a closer reading of Marxist thought. Ferguson outlines Marx’s theories on property ownership, production and commodity, and bourgeois ideology in order to ultimately critique marxism’s universalization of heteropatriarchy and its subsequent neglect of racial, gender, and sexual particularities. If I remain interested in the effects neoliberal multiculturalism has on mixed-race embodiment, Marxism may be a school of thought I need to become more familiar with.